


025 "Berlin"

by wheel_pen



Series: Iron Man AU [25]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fish out of Water, My Pepper is different, Pre-Iron Man, Swearing, Violence, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 03:23:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/756446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone takes a shot at Tony and Pepper in Berlin, and the bullets come just a little too close to Pepper for Tony’s comfort. Later, Tony has a mini-breakdown at Rhodey’s house, proving just how poorly he handles traumatic situations. “This is the story about Berlin. I'd been there before, and I've had to go back since, but there's only one story.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	025 "Berlin"

**Author's Note:**

> 1) My Pepper is very different from canon Pepper. Her personality/origin is very different; to separate her from canon Pepper I've given her a new last name and a different hair color.
> 
> 2) The bad words are censored. That's just how I do things.
> 
> 3) Stories are numbered in the order I wrote them, which isn't necessarily the order in which they occur. At some point I'll post a timeline.
> 
> I wrote this series after the first Iron Man movie came out. It's very AU but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play with these characters.

            This is the story about Berlin.

            I'd been there before, and I've had to go back since, but there's only one story.

            We were in Berlin for a big design conference. I was the keynote speaker, naturally. Oddly, the trip started out with me being mad at Pepper, for a professional reason, which was rare because normally Pepper was awesome at her job. I have to admit that really, it was my own fault—I had told her to make up the slide presentation for my speech, and then I hadn't checked it until the night before the speech. Yeah, that was dumb of me, I know. Someone else usually made the slide shows—I don't remember now why I gave the job to Pepper. But, when I finally checked out the file, I was—horrified.

            The _thing_ Pepper had produced was simply not comprehensible to a normal human, even highly intelligent engineer-type humans. I'm talking about random blinking symbols, weird color combinations, flashy and pointless animations—it was like she'd taken the text of my speech and the diagrams I'd given her and made some kind of abstract, bizarro-world interpretation of them.

            I don't want to spend much time on the scene that followed, because it got kind of ugly. At first I thought she had to playing some kind of joke on me, and that the _real_ file was just hidden somewhere else on the computer. Then I started to get really p----d off at her, because I thought _she_ was really p----d off at _me_ and pulling some kind of passive-aggressive s—t. Finally, I realized she honestly believed it was not only aesthetically pleasing but also informative—upside-down text and all—and I booted her out of the room so I could fix it. Clearly she had also neglected to run this mess by Legal, Design, and everyone else who signed off on these things, so I had to call back to the office (fortunately it was only mid-afternoon there) and get everyone to approve my new version. I could tell she felt really bad about the whole thing, but I was too tired to care by the time I'd repaired the damage—I barely had time to grab a few hours' sleep before I had to actually deliver the d—n thing. Granted, this would probably have been my schedule anyway, and I would've been hungover in the morning to boot.

            So I gave my presentation the next day, and I was brilliant, per usual. I enjoyed giving speeches where I got to remind people of all the revolutionary design concepts my company had contributed to the field (mostly through my own inventions, and my father's). There was a little meet-and-greet afterwards, and then Pepper and I were going to grab some lunch before I returned to the hotel to lounge in the sun for a few hours. If you're wondering about the other seminars at the conference—well, that's what _Pepper_ was going to be doing all afternoon. You didn't honestly think _I_ would be sitting in some stuffy conference room for hours watching people drone on about design, did you?

            But of course, the after-presentation plans didn't materialize. We were walking across the plaza in front of the conference center—it was a sunny day, kind of hot, and there were a lot of people around admiring the sculptures and fountains. I heard a weird sort of noise from the crowd behind me, yelling and gasping, and I turned to look. Then I was being knocked to the ground, gunshots were ringing out, people were screaming and stampeding. It was chaos.

            Pepper was on top of me and I pushed her off so I could sit up. Happy had a guy on the ground not fifteen feet away from us, and there was a gun lying nearby. I barely had time to process that scene before I turned to Pepper.

            "Are you alright?" I asked urgently, feeling her leg, her side, the back of her head, anywhere I thought she might have been injured.

            I remember she said she was fine, and I remember turning back to look at the skinny, scruffy guy struggling in Happy's grip like a fish on a line. I don't really remember getting up, or making a conscious decision, but the next thing I knew I was beating the guy's head against the stone rim of a fountain while Happy, Pepper, and a couple of policemen tried to pull me off him.

            Happy bundled us into the car and headed off—at some point the police must've been given my name and hotel, because they contacted me there later, but I don't remember that either. I didn't remember _thinking_ at all, really—it was like my brain had shut down and I was acting on pure impulse.

            The first thing I did in the car was feel Pepper up again—which unfortunately I don't mean in the sense I would've liked to. I had to know she wasn't hurt—if she was Happy was going to be speeding towards the nearest hospital, I didn't care if it was only for a scraped elbow. My hand brushed her side again and for a second I felt a coolness, not the warmer fabric of her suit, and when I yanked her around for a better look I saw pale skin—through the bullet holes.

            I'm sure I was saying things all this time, because I tend to chatter, and I'm also sure it wasn't really that important—probably a lot of swearing, "Are you okay?" and so forth. But when I found the bullet holes— _in her clothing_ —I stopped talking.

            And then Pepper _started_ talking—"Mr. Stark, I'm alright, I'm fine"—but I wasn't listening, I was yanking her blouse out of her skirt, trying to pull her skirt down, looking for the injury that logically had to accompany a bullet hole in a shirt. I was so terrified I was finally going to get her in the right light, at the right angle, and then this bloodstain was just going to bloom across her grey clothing, across her pale skin, a massive wound I had somehow missed before.

            I couldn't find it. I hit the intercom switch and found my voice again. "Happy, take us to—"

            Pepper overrode me. "Please continue to the hotel, Mr. Hogan." She sounded much more calm than I did, so it was no surprise Happy listened to her instead. "I'm alright," she assured me. She ran her hand over my arms, shoulders, the back of my neck, the back of my head. "Are _you_ alright?" The question seemed almost an afterthought to her—as though she knew I wasn't and was just asking me to distract me.

            "Pepper—you were _shot_ —"

            "Obviously, I _wasn't_ ," she corrected gently, trying to calm me. "I probably just tore the holes when I fell"—when she knocked me down—"or when we were getting into the car."

            "Don't b------t me, Pepper," I snapped, grabbing her hands to still them. "I know what a f‑‑‑‑‑g bullet hole looks like."

            "Then it must have just missed me."

            Well, yes, it must have—I mean, what other possible explanation was there? She obviously wasn't wearing a bulletproof vest or something like that, and there was no pocket in the jacket or blouse that might have contained some small object that miraculously stopped the bullet. So it must have just grazed her. Grazed her so closely that it tore her thin silk blouse, although there didn't seem to be a scratch on her skin. I had seen a lot of bullet holes in all kinds of substances, and it looked to me like this was a straight-on hit, not a sideways glance, but—but then again when objects were moving bullets could make strange marks. And of course—she _wasn't_ hurt. So there really wasn't any other possible explanation.

            Of course, the fact that Pepper didn't have a bullet penetrate her skin was a mere technicality—the bullet had come far, _far_ too close to her, and the idea that a millimeter's movement, a millisecond's hesitation, could have changed the bullet's course and left her bleeding to death on the tiles of the plaza—the bullet that was obviously meant for me, that she had put herself in the way of—The picture of what _might_ have happened was more terrifying than it _actually_ happening, I think, because there were so many _mights_ I could run through my head. If it had _actually_ happened—not that I even needed to say I didn't _want_ it to—at least there would have been only one reality for me to focus on.

            Somehow we got back to the hotel room. I managed to tell Happy he'd done a h—l of a job, which seemed a little inadequate—was there a special card you could get for a bodyguard who'd saved your life, or were flowers more appropriate? Maybe an extra week's paid vacation.

            Almost immediately the police came knocking and we had to go over the whole scene again, although somehow putting everything into words—gruff German words at that—made it more black and white and flat, less colorful and emotional and real. By the third time I might have been describing a scene from a movie.

            The police didn't give us any trouble, for once—there were plenty of witnesses to say the man had just started shooting with no provocation, and apparently his name had turned up a history of mental illness in their files. I wondered if his name would turn up a crazy threatening letter in the Stark Industries Security division, or if he had just chosen his victims randomly. Whatever his goal, if he had one, he probably didn't think his day would end with severe head trauma—which the police seemed to be regarding as a sort of self-defense, although I didn't think that would stick if the guy got a decent lawyer. Still, it meant they left us in peace sooner.

            I sent Happy off to his room—he had certainly earned a break, though he made me promise I wouldn't set foot out of my own room without telling him. That seemed like a d—n fine idea to _me_.

            Once the police had gone and the room phone was unplugged—one call from the media was all that took—it became too quiet, and I started thinking. Brooding. Getting angry.

            "Sir, if you would just sit down—" Pepper pleaded, following me from room to room in the suite.

            "Take off that g-----n jacket!" I ordered her. "Get rid of it! I don't want to see it again!" She removed the suit jacket with the bullet hole and tucked it into her suitcase. I wanted to light a fire in the middle of the room and burn it to ashes—but Pepper would probably just get the hole repaired when we got home. "The shirt, too!" One of my shirts was lying across the bed, tossed there in haste this morning, and I thrust it at her. "Put this on instead." She did as she was told.

            Then it was _her_ turn to undress _me_. "Let me just take your jacket, sir," she persuaded. "Let's just change your shirt. How about some jeans instead? That's more comfortable." It wasn't until I was handing her the clothes that I realized they had blood on them—not mine and not hers, though, which was most important.

            An hour later even Pepper's patience was nearly at an end trying to settle me—and then my cell phone rang, with what could only be _more_ agitation. " _Tony, what the f—k is going on?!_ " Obadiah demanded.

            "Pepper got _shot_ , that's what the f—k is going on!" I replied.

            " _What?!_ "

            Pepper wrestled the phone away from me. "I did _not_ get shot!" she insisted.

            I snatched it back in time to hear Obadiah's next comment. " _Somebody had better explain this to me, because all I've got is grainy Internet video of Tony beating the s—t out of some guy‑‑_ "

            "He f-----g _shot_ Pepper!" I shouted into the phone. Why was this so difficult to understand? "Don't you have a little movie clip of _that_?!"

            " _It's playing on a news feed from Berlin_ ," he reported. " _I'm waiting on the translation for the full story—_ "

            "Learn f-----g German!" I advised him, emphatically.

            " _Well why don't_ you _f-----g_ translate _?!_ " he demanded in return.

            Unfortunately all three TVs in the suite, with their extensive satellite link-ups, had recently been rendered inoperable by contact with either the floor or objects I had hurled at them, and Pepper was keeping the laptops hidden in case I was tempted to deliver them a similar fate.

            " _It's gonna be picked up by CNN any minute, if they can verify it_ ," Obadiah added. " _So don't answer the room phone—_ "

            "Figured that one out already, genius!" I snapped.

            " _How many drinks have you had?_ " he asked.

            Why did it always come back to this, these completely irrelevant questions? "Three."

            " _So… seven?_ "

            "No, _three_ , you f----r, and why don't you call the Berlin police and ask them about the a‑‑‑‑‑e they have in custody, who is _not_ me?!"

            Still he persisted. " _How_ _many drinks did you have_ before _this happened?_ "

            "None!" I insisted. "It was _noon_ here!"

            " _That's_ three AM _here, Tony_ ," he reminded me, " _which was about when I was awakened with news of your latest escapade! I want to know what happened_ now _—so put Pepper on the phone._ "

            "What for?" I asked in confusion, maneuvering out of her reach again.

            " _Because I want to talk to someone_ calm—"

            "I AM CALM!!"

            "— _who isn't going to f-----g exaggerate!_ "

            "She has _bullet holes in her clothing_!" I told him. "How the f—k could I exaggerate _that_?!"

            " _Tony, you beat in a guy's head while he was being held down by your bodyguard_ ," Obadiah replied, as if that was somehow important. " _So don't tell me you weren't overreacting! Now let me talk to Pepper, g-------t!_ "

            I was about to tell him what he could do with his overreactions when Pepper snuck in and took the phone from me. I let it go—obviously he wasn't going to listen to me, and since he had mentioned drinking more, I intended to clean out the mini-bar. At least then I wouldn't be able to imagine Pepper bleeding out on the plaza, or in an ambulance, or in an emergency room—well, I would still imagine it, but the picture would be blurrier.

            A few minutes later—maybe half an hour, maybe longer—Pepper came back in the bedroom, the long tails of my shirt half-covering her designer skirt that now had no matching jacket. None I would ever allow her to wear, anyway. "Be careful of the broken glass," I warned. Some of those little bottles were not very well balanced.

            She picked her way over to the chair and eased herself down on my lap. For a few minutes there was silence, except for the sound of her heartbeat under my ear—steady, like a machine—and the rasp of her hand brushing the back of my neck. "Mr. Stane was very sympathetic once I explained what happened," she said quietly.

            I snorted. "I'm sure. Does my attempted murder send the stock price up or down?"

            Pepper chided me lightly for my cynical attitude. "He wanted to know if he should fly out here and meet us. To help."

            "To make sure I stay inside and don't make things worse," I countered.

            "He was very upset," she told me.

            I resisted making another snide remark—such as, _that I survived?_ —and pulled Pepper closer. My hand went to the spot above her hip where there _should_ have been a gaping hole. "Are you sure you're okay?" I asked her, staring up at her face. "No bruises or scrapes?"

            She smiled reassuringly. "No, sir. I landed on you, after all."

            "I don't seem to have any bruises, either," I commented, bemused. "And I landed on the _ground_. With you on top of me."

            "Well, maybe they'll show up in a day or two," Pepper speculated. "You probably can't feel them at the moment." Likely true, paltry though the mini-bar was.

            "Pepper, don't—don't ever do that again," I told her suddenly, as serious as was possible for me. I could tell from her expression that she was going to try to lighten the mood by deliberately misunderstanding me—'What, fall on top of you? I thought you would like that'—but I stopped her. "Just don't."

            "If there is trouble," she replied slowly, in the vagary of the year, "of course I will try to help you."

            I rubbed the spot above her hip. "Not if it means you get hurt. Not if it means you…"

            She hugged me close so I didn't have to finish my statement. "I didn't get hurt," she reminded me. "Everything's fine."

            Well, that was hardly true, but I understood her sentiment. "Stay in here tonight," I told her, which came out as more of a question, or a plea. The suite had two bedrooms, one of which was hers, but at the moment it seemed frighteningly far away, a distance I could never cross in time.

            "I will," she promised.

            In an alternate universe, something could have happened here. There was a moment when we balanced on the knife edge, when my eyes flickered down to her lips and her fingers tightened on my shoulder, a moment when even sitting in the same chair wasn't close enough and I needed her assurance that she was alive and alright in a more primal way. A moment when I thought she recognized it, too, and felt the same way.

            But then the moment passed. "It's only mid-afternoon, though, sir," she pointed out, too cheerfully. "It's a long time until dark. And we missed lunch. Why don't I order room service, and we'll get this place cleaned up."

            "If that's what you want, Pepper."

            "That's what I want, sir."

 

            Less than a week later I was back in the States, sitting on the back porch at Rhodey’s drinking a beer. It was kind of hard to proceed with legal matters when your perpetrator was in a coma, but it was looking like he was just some kind of crazy who’d had a bad day and was trying for ‘suicide by cop.’ Well, he should’ve chosen a place with more cops around, since all he got was ‘permanent disability by Stark.’

            Rhodey ignored that little joke. “So do you think you’ll have to go back and do anything?”

            I shrugged. “The lawyers are still working on it. But I don’t think so.”

            Rhodey shook his head. “I can’t believe the bullet actually came that close to Pepper. You two have some luck.”

            “I know!” I agreed. “It was pretty crazy.” Okay, our conversation sounds a little banal here, I admit, but that’s because we’d already been over it so often. And we were at his home trying not to say anything bad the kids might overhear. And we were guys—it’s more about the tone and body language.

            So, for example, when Rhodey asked, “You okay, man?” what he really meant was, “You’ve just been through a traumatic experience. You should consider talking to a mental health professional so it doesn’t haunt you forever.”

            And when I replied, “Yeah, of course, I’m fine,” he knew I meant, “Actually, I’m planning to deal with it in my normal unhealthy way like I do everything else, but please don’t nag me about it because I’ll only stop talking to you.” You see how much more efficient our way is?

            “It’s been getting a lot of media attention,” he went on. “Even the local news.” Which of course meant, “I had to send the kids out of the room so they wouldn’t hear about you being shot at or whaling on someone.”

            I snorted. “Yeah, did you see the article in _USA Today_? It had this grainy picture of Pepper with the headline, ‘This Woman Would Take a Bullet for Tony Stark.’ Apparently that’s a rare thing.” Which was basically my way of deliberately misunderstanding what Rhodey _really_ said, because even though I didn’t want to upset the kids I thought Rhodey and Rae coddled them too much. I would’ve let them watch the news, and then I would have talked with them about how there are a _few_ crazy a-----es in the world and when one of them attacks you, you have to strike back. And about how they shouldn’t actually use the word a-----e when repeating our discussion to their parents.

            Then we were just quiet for a while. It was a nice evening and their suburb was pretty quiet; the twelve-foot solid fence around the property kind of helped muffle outside noises as well. There were two motivations for them getting that massive fence—me, and the dog. Me, because even _without_ sensational murder attempts there were always a few paparazzi willing to trespass in order to get photos of me playing frisbie in a backyard, and it definitely escalated _with_ the sensation. But when the neighbors asked Rhodey and Rae could honestly blame Buster, who seemed to see less formidable barriers as merely playful challenges to his Houdini-esque escape skills. Still, they could always have gone with one of those electronic fences that gave him a little zap when he tried to cross it (there were several people at the company who would _love_ to have something like that for _me_ ).

            So everything was quiet. And then of course—there was a crash. I was out of my chair in an instant, darting back into the house, looking around for Pepper, my heart racing beyond all reason. Rhodey was several paces behind me, not having perceived the noise as unusual in a house with two kids and a dog. The commotion was coming from the kitchen, where, judging from the positions of the key players, Ellie had just dropped a plate of food on the floor.

            Rae and Pepper were trying to clean it up while Ellie sobbed—she was at the age when any mistake or hint of awkwardness was devastatingly mortifying, which made for quite a bit of drama. Rhodey tried to comfort her while I grabbed the dog, who was eager to investigate human food on the floor.

            “Hey, come here, Buster, leave that alone! Mikey, go put him in the garage,” I suggested, which got rid of both the dog and the older brother who was at the age when any mistake or hint of awkwardness in his sister was cause for gleeful mockery.

            “I’ll get the vacuum,” Rhodey announced, pushing the crying girl at me. Like I was qualified to deal with this.

            “Hey, don’t be embarrassed, Ellie,” I tried to tell her. “It was just an accident. That’s way better than getting mad and breaking stuff on purpose like I do.”

            Rae gave me a chiding look from the floor but was distracted by Pepper. “This is pretty,” she commented, holding up a chunk of the plate that contained part of the pattern. “May I keep this?”

            “Um, sure, if it’s clean,” Rae replied distractedly.

            Rhodey returned with the vacuum. I jumped a little when he turned it on, because it was so frickin’ loud. And then Mikey came back and started tormenting his sister, who yelled back at him. And I could hear Buster yapping in protest from the garage. And Rae started up the garbage disposal to get rid of the spilled food. The noise was too much for me and I grabbed Pepper, pulling her into the living room. I couldn’t even _think_ with all that noise, let alone hear what was going on outside or in the other rooms, which were supposed to be empty but you never knew—

            “Are you alright, sir?” Pepper asked, taking my hands. They seemed much more still when she held them.

            “I’m fine,” I assured her hurriedly, looking around for any bystanders. “Are you okay? You didn’t—cut yourself or anything? On the broken glass?”

            “It was a plate,” Pepper corrected me.

            “Broken china, ceramic, whatever.” The kitchen was still too loud and I drew Pepper farther down the hall where the bedrooms were.

            “I don’t know what plates are made of,” she was babbling.

            “I don’t f-----g know, either,” I snapped. The hallway was quieter but also darker and I couldn’t remember where the light switch was.

            “Are you looking for something, sir?” Pepper asked worriedly.

            “Come on, in here,” I decided, leading her into the guest bedroom. It had some kind of scary poppy theme, with blood-red flowers blooming across grey pillows and bedspreads and curtains, but with the door shut it was at least mostly quiet, and the ceiling light was fairly bright.

            “You look a little pale,” Pepper observed with a frown.

            “Let’s sit down.” But not on the blossom-spattered bed or matching chair—G-d, did Rae buy the world’s entire supply of that hideous pattern? How could any guest stand so much of it without getting nauseated? The best I could do was sit on the floor with the bed at my back, trying not to look around. The bright flowers seemed to move, to expand, if you looked at them too hard. “Come here.”

            I put my arms around Pepper, holding her close. “Are you alright?” she repeated.

            “Well, _yeah_ ,” I replied. Why wouldn’t I be? “It was just really loud in there. I don’t know how Rhodey stands it. We could never have kids, it would just be chaos.”

            “Let’s not get a dog, either,” Pepper voted, with some distaste.

            I chuckled. “Okay. No dogs, either.”

            “I think we should get a parrot, though,” Pepper went on speculatively, “and I would teach it to say nice things to you. Like, ‘Good morning, Mr. Stark.’ And, ‘You look very nice today, Mr. Stark.’ And, ‘What a good idea, Mr. Stark!’”

            Somehow I found this unreasonably hilarious, like eyes-watering-with-laughter funny. “Oh my G-d, Pepper, what would _you_ do then? You’d never speak at all!”

            “Or we could teach it to swear and say how smart it was and whistle at women,” she continued, “and send it into work in place of _you_.” I completely collapsed on the floor at this point, I was laughing so hard. “It could say, ‘That’s awesome!’ and ‘Get me a cheeseburger!’” Which was _even_ funnier, possibly to dangerous levels, because I had been _just_ about to tell Pepper her idea was ‘awesome.’

            There was a tentative knock on the door and it opened slowly. “Are you guys okay?” Rhodey asked, staying carefully on the other side. This could have meant a lot of things, actually, from “Are you having a stress-induced nervous breakdown?” to “If you two are naked in bed right now I will skin you alive!”

            “Oh yeah,” I assured him, trying to calm down a little. “In fact Pepper and I have just made a big decision.” Rhodey decided to risk the naked-in-bed scene and stuck his head around the door. “We’re gonna get a parrot!”

            “A… parrot?” Rhodey repeated slowly. No doubt he was looking at my body language—sprawled across the floor with Pepper tangled in parts, still drying my eyes and chuckling a little—and trying to discern what I really meant by that.

            But sometimes a parrot is just a parrot. “We’re gonna teach it to growl and insult me, and it can replace Obadiah!” I suggested, losing what little calm I had achieved.

            “I think we’re gonna need a minute,” Pepper told Rhodey.

            “Yeah, we gotta _lot_ more plans for this bird!” I added.

            “No problem,” Rhodey agreed, although he didn’t seem to see the humor in it. Maybe you had to be there from the start. “Take as long as you need.” He shut the door and left us in peace.


End file.
